Equinox Gold Corp. (AMEX:EQX) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Greg Smith: It’s at somewhat, call it, typical operations pattern where you head into budgeting and mine managers, our general managers recognize that they got behind on the sustaining spend and want to get it done before the end of the year. So you can assume that we’ll have more in Q4.

Anita Soni: Can you got to move up their budget deadlines to like –get them going. Okay. And so higher sustaining capital spend in Q4, but lower sustaining capital spend in — or sorry, lower development capital spend as [indiscernible] in Q4.

Greg Smith: Correct.

Operator: The next question is from Wayne Lam with RBC.

Wayne Lam: Okay. Great. Just wondering at Santa Luz. Obviously, a very unfortunate situation this past quarter. Can you just provide a bit more detail into what happened in terms of breach and safety protocols?

Doug Reddy: The answer is no. And the reason is because we haven’t really — out of respect for the employee’s family colleagues, we’re not going into any details publicly on what happened.

Wayne Lam: Okay. Got it. And then maybe at Greenstone, — really nice to see things on track. Just wondering with the project, 85% complete, $170 million left to spend and $300 million in cash with the revolver fully drawn. Are you guys seeing any additional large spend or bottleneck items ahead as you enter the home stretch here.

Peter Hardie: The short answer, Wayne is no. the focus is on — we’re in that phase towards the tail end of construction. It’s a fairly linear relationship between the amount of piping and electrical installation you have and the manpower that you have doing it and their productivity rate. They’ve made great progress through the summer, which is what was planned. And very fortunately, they’re staying on schedule on that front. So it’s really just keeping working that schedule, maintaining the productivity rates that we need. We’re happy with our commissioning readiness. And we had a great report from Greenstone yesterday that the recruiting is going very well in relation to operational readiness. We had an external review of our operational readiness by another group, which also went well.

So with respect to what we have left, based on all the feedback that we have from our work internally from the assessments that we have done by independent groups, we don’t believe right now that we do have bottlenecks that have significant remaining risk, unmitigated risk related to them.

Greg Smith: And Doug referenced employee — how many employees we have today and where we need to get to by the end of the year, we’re in a pretty heavy recruitment drive to ramp up the workforce. That’s actually going really well. It was a little challenging like a few months ago, we had our own questions whether we’d get there. But as the mines advance, we’ve been able to really increase the level of workforce for operations quite quickly. And it looks like we’re on track for year-end. But that was one area where we definitely knew we had to focus. But now we just got a full update yesterday again, and things are going very well at Greenstone. And hopefully, you’re coming Wayne, in September, and you can see it for yourself.

Wayne Lam: Yes. That’s definitely plan to be there. And it sounds like you guys are in a pretty comfortable spot. Just wanted to confirm the original CapEx number had about $125 million in fleet purchases. Can you remind me if you guys have moved to fleet financing and you happen to have an estimate of what kind of operating cost impact that might have as we kind of look out to next year?

Greg Smith: We did move to fleet financing, Wayne, and we haven’t done any guidance on what 2024 and operations look like. So we don’t have an update on how that might affect operating costs. We will obviously provide that as part of our 2024 guidance when we release it, but it’s not something that we have today.